From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 by John Connelly (review)

John Connelly’s new book is a fascinating study of the intellectual, cultural, and even social roots of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on Jews and Judaism. As an exploration of a fundamental sea change in official church policy toward the “stock of Abraham” and their religion, the book also serves as a biography of its main intellectual contributor, the Austrian John Oesterreicher, a convert to Catholicism who still insisted on his own Jewish identity. His theological sparring partner, Karl Thieme, another convert to Catholicism, plays a close supporting role. Interestingly, nearly all of the Catholic intellects involved in this history stood on the “margins”: either as converts to Catholicism or as German-speaking expatriates of Nazi Europe. The majority of its pages necessarily dwells on the many hurdles that had to be overcome. Surprisingly, they were created not only by obvious antisemites in the clerical establishment but also by the philosemites whose advocacy of a new understanding between Christian and Jew nonetheless brought with it heavy theological baggage.

As Connelly’s narrative makes clear, primarily the lived experiences of these marginal Catholics best explains their attempt at a reinterpretation of scripture and church history to reverse centuries of Christian Jew-hatred. They formed a self-conscious milieu that had debated theology since the 1930s, using the periodical Freiburger Rundbrief as their primary vessel. Connelly demonstrates that a process of detoxification was necessary even for those theologians fighting what they understood as a “pagan” form of antisemitism. This self-criticism required the gradual abandoning of cherished ideas about Judaism as the “absolute antithesis” (223) of Christianity and of Jewish “disobedience” (212) to God bringing persecution upon them. It was amazing that Oesterreicher, as a convert from Judaism, subscribed to such views; like many others, he supposed that they were fighting antisemitism while nonetheless blaming the Jews for its existence. Connelly argues that Thieme’s challenge to Oesterreicher served as the crucial dialogue that undid this cognitive dissonance among Christians. For both Nazi racists and their Catholic opponents, the Jew was evil—the difference being that Catholics believed Jews could rid themselves of it, whereas Nazis did not. Thieme was the first to conclude, after the Holocaust, that the true answer was for Christians to abandon this idea, and therefore their mission to the Jews; but only after overcoming his own view that Jews were destined to suffer, that “God is an enemy to them” (195). One of Connelly’s most interesting insights is to show that, in order to make inroads with other Catholics, circle members constructed lies to convince other Catholics that such hatred had never really been part of church canon or history. “If Thieme had affirmed that the church once stoked antisemitism, he would have justified the antisemites’ claim that Christianity and antisemitism were compatible” (155).

After the war, actual Jews like Abraham Heschel pointed to the inadequacy and hubris of their early efforts but also praised and encouraged genuinely positive developments. Real progress only came when the underlying motive for interaction with Jews changed—a process impossible without the horrors of Auschwitz. If the circle members first saw their engagement with Judaism, and then actual Jews, as a sort of theological truce, this posture soon gave way to a metaphorical peace treaty and even to favored-nation status. That the circle’s theological reformulations would eventually be accepted by the Vatican is explained, outside of a few heroes like John XXIII, in mostly secular terms. Connelly insists that the statement was moved forward by political maneuvering and the leaking of drafts to the press rather than some broad moral or ethical awakening to the horrific fruits born of Christian supersessionism or triumphalism.

Nationalism, eugenicism, and antisemitism only became problems for the church when they were tied to Nazi “paganism.” With the help of recently published source...